DNS servers--an Internet Achilles' heel

@ 2005/08/03

Hundreds of thousands of Internet servers are at risk of an attack that would redirect unknowing Web surfers from legitimate sites to malicious ones.

In a scan of 2.5 million so-called Domain Name System machines, which act as the White Pages of the Internet, security researcher Dan Kaminsky found that about 230,000 are potentially vulnerable to a threat known as DNS cache poisoning.

"That is almost 10 percent of the scanned DNS servers," Kaminsky said in a presentation last week at the Black Hat security event in Las Vegas. "If you are not auditing your DNS servers, please start," he said.